Review – Resurrection Blues
Old Vic
17 February 2006
Take a play that is written by Arthur Miller, directed by Robert Altman, staged at the Old Vic under the artistic directorship of Kevin Spacey, and starring a cast of feted actors including Maximillian Schell, James Fox, Jane Adams and Neve Campbell. Add in the fact that the mid-price tickets, which were towards the back of the theatre, were £27.50. You’d expect it to be good, right? I certainly did.
Unfortunately I was disappointed, as were the five friends who came with me. It wasn’t bad like The Soldier’s Tale, it was merely mediocre. The difference is The Soldier’s Tale cost £10 and I had no expectations. For Resurrection Blues, we all expected better.
For starters, I saw something that I’ve never seen in a major theatrical production in the West End or anywhere in the world and never thought I would. The lead character (General Felix Barriaux played by Schell) forgot his lines not once, not twice but three times and had to be prompted loudly and repeatedly from the prompter standing in the wings. We could not only hear the prompter but also the actor saying “pardon, could you repeat that, please?” I do realise that it’s difficult to commit scripts to memory and Schell had a lot of lines but surely that’s why the theatrical gods invented improvisation? Fox was just as bad – he didn’t help out his co-star at all but just stood there looking embarrassed as if it had nothing to do with him.
It’s ironic because in the programme there is an account of the rehearsal process:
Eventually the scene becomes muddled, the actors stumble over their lines. Altman stands up for the first time. ‘We can’t stage this properly until you have the tempo,’ he says. ‘If one person forgets a line and breaks the rhythm, it throws the others.’
Altman must be furious now! It was only the third night – and there is often a slump in quality after the high of the first night – so it will probably improve but this is no trivial matter. It was extraordinarily distracting and embarrassing for the audience.
The play itself was interesting but it’s certainly not one of Miller’s great works. Miller, who died in 2005, completed an early version of Resurrection Blues in 2002 and the revised version in 2004. This was the British premiere. The play is about a South American dictator who plans to crucify a revolutionary who many of his people believe to be the son of god and, in a wonderful although absurd commentary on modern reality TV, he sells exclusive broadcast rights to an American pharmaceutical company. The play opens with a (word perfect) monologue from Campbell’s character, Jeanine Schultz, who is paralysed and in a wheelchair after jumping out of a window and surviving. She certainly has the ‘resurrection blues’ but the theme of resurrection is also about the crucifixion and there is a later miracle (I won’t spoil it by saying exactly what) that is also a form of resurrection.
The revolving stage was cool, the cross on the mountain with the Macchu Picchu-eque backdrop visually arresting and a lot of the dialogue (when it was remembered) sparkly and witty. The acting was okay – I wasn’t entirely convinced by Campbell as a paraplegic but I could suspend disbelief. Schell was actually one of the best performers for his impersonation of the idiosyncratic dictator and although he forgot his lines, he at least did so in character.
The play is short – two hours including an interval – and actually ends quite abruptly. No one was expecting the ending when it came, which on the plus side also meant that no one was hanging out for it in desperation! But despite a few positives, we pretty much all felt ripped off and disappointed about the experience.
I am prepared to take a few risks in my theatre going in order to see some cool stuff and not just limit myself to the tried and tested. It’s just a shame that such well-respected theatre practitioners could do something so ordinary – it’s plays like this that turn people off going to the theatre.
Rating: 5/10 (would have been 6/10 if Schell hadn’t forgotten his lines)
Update 27 February 2006: I have been informed by a friend that the play was actually in preview at the time we saw it but nowhere is this apparent on the Old Vic website, which says the play runs 14 February – 22 April. The tickets were full price.
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